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Alder

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Our native alder is a medium sized tree with a narrow crown and short, spreading branches. It grows extensively in damp places alongside streams, rivers, ponds and lakes as well as marshy areas.

There are a number at Upton Country Park where the water is, of course saline, so it seems to be tolerant of salt. In some boggy areas it grows in great perfusion and forms the habitat commonly called alder carr. Alder is rarely planted as it has little forestry value although wood turners quite like it because the wood is both strong yet easily worked.

The tree has both sexes of flowers on it. There are the male catkins that resemble hazel catkins but are longer. The female flowers develop a little later and are smaller, cylindrical and are purplish brown in colour. The flowers are wind pollinated.

Fertile female flowers develop in to small cones and they will often stay on the tree all winter, long after the seeds have dropped. The seeds themselves are distributed generally by floating on the water until they reach land. These cones, which are quite unique for a deciduous tree, are quite often the defining feature in winter.

The alder bears on its roots little nodules that contain a live bacterium which enable it to make soluble nitrogen salts out of the inert nitrogen of the air. Consequently, the soil on which alder grows is remarkably fertile.

The records for this species have been organised into reports, charts, maps and photos. Click a pic below to see the detail:

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This website has been created by, and is the copyright of, Peter Orchard, Wareham, Dorset. The website is run as a hobby and the information is made available free of charge to anyone who finds it useful. No responsibility is accepted for any errors or omissions in the data and information supplied. Copyright of all photographs on this website (unless otherwise stated) remains with the publisher or the contributor and they should not be used by others for any purpose without permission.

Please note that the data on this website is not the result of scientific research, it is a collection of random observations made by a very amateur enthusiast. The species database covers everything from mammals to fungi and no one can be an expert in all of these taxa and much of the identification is restricted by the quality of reference material available. One person cannot possibly produce the definitive guide to the nature of Dorset and so species lists will be incomplete and there will be reserves not covered but as time goes by so the database will grow and (depending on health and the weather) the content will become more comprehensive as time passes.

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